The rise in the demand for food and in agricultural prices has
stimulated the development of agriculture, its capacity to
increase its purchases from industry and its deliveries of
products to the market. Increased consumption of producer
goods has been sustained by increased agricultural prices and
state subsidies for the purchase of equipment more than by
advances in agricultural productivity: the growth in agricultural
production has been obtained by extending crops rather than by
increased yields.

Agriculture's demand for industrial goods

Over the past decade there has been striking growth of agriculture's
demand for industrially produced goods. Between 1965 and 1985 the
number of tractors has more than doubled, from 24,510 to over
50,000; the number of combine harvesters increased from 2,450 to
4,800. Consumption of fertilizers and other chemical products has
risen more slowly.

The greatest growth has been of goods and inputs, use of which
ensures high production: mechanization, irrigation equipment,
fertilizers and plant protection products for growing fruit and
vegetables, and so on.

The public agricultural sector still absorbs the largest share
of capital goods and intermediate products, but in the 1980s, the
private sector has rapidly reduced the gap with consumption of
some goods (irrigation equipment, building materials and means of
transport) exceeding that of the public sector.17
Between 1980 and 1983, the private sector acquired 27.000
tractors. 4.000 hand ploughs. 10 000 transport vans. 2.000
lorries and 30.000 motor-driven pumps.

Fertilizer and pesticide use is, for example, almost wholly
limited to market-gardening and to a much lesser extent to
cereals; only the public sector is developing the use of mineral
fertilizer on cereals and pulses along with a more intensive use
of mechanization and improved seeds.

In private sector cereal farming, where topographical
conditions are favourable, machines have replaced animal power
and human labour, but without updating cultivation techniques to
promote more intensive soil-use. Instead, there has been
mechanization of traditional techniques, whose effects on soil
conservation are negative.18 Private producers' use of
mechanization is to reduce growing costs rather than as a means
of intensification of production.

Unlike the demand for machines, which is potentially high
following the reduction of the number of milch cows and the rise
in wages, the use of fertilizers and chemical products seems to
have stagnated for several years. Consumption levels are less
than half the norms recommended by the crop intensification
targets set by the Ministry of Agriculture, (For example, 203,951
metric tons in 1984, as against a target of 459.000, or only
44%.) This is because in years of inadequate rainfall, or in
areas where annual rainfall is less than 400 mm, fertilizers have
little effect on productivity.

Generally, despite more widespread use of chemical products
and machines, yields for all crops and livestock have remained
excessively low: six or seven quintals on average per hectare for
cereals, 18 quintals for forage crops, 60 to 80 quintals for
vegetables and fruit. 2.500 Iitres of milk per cow.

State policy during the period 1973-83 was to promote
agriculture's use of industrially produced goods. Large subsidies
were given for agricultural machinery, chemical products and
irrigation equipment. In particular, it attempted, through the
relationship between cereal and fertilizer prices, to increase
the demand for fertilizers and plant protection products. As
Table 4.6 shows, the wheat-fertilizer price ratio went from 1.15
to 1974 to 2.90 in 1985.

Table 4.6
Prices: wheat/fertilizer compared

Producer price: wheat

Producer
price:fertilizers (NPK 12.18.18)

Ratio: cereal/fertilizers
prices

Yield per hectare

1974

67.70

55.2

1.15

5.8

1980

125.00

55.2

2.26

6.4

1985

200.00

69.0

2.90

6.09

Sources: Adapted from various issues of Statistiques
Agricoles.

Until 1982, industries had to directly subsidize agriculture
for the acquisition of equipment and products, selling prices
being imposed by the state and frozen at their 1973 level. Since
1983, when the government took otter direct aid to agriculture as
a charge on the budget, it has begun gradually to reduce the
amount of subsidies and align selling prices on acquisition
(import) and/or manufacturing costs. To balance this, it has
agreed to large increases in agricultural producer prices in
order to maintain demand. For example, the price ofone
quintal of hard wheat in 1980 and 1981 was AD 125, in 1986 AD
220: soft wheat at AD 115 per quintal in 1980 and 1981 rose to AD
210 in 1986: milk. 1980 and 1981, AD 1.75 per litre, 1986 AD
4.00. Potatoes, beans and lentils showed similar increases
between 1980 and 1986.

Prices of fertilizers and mechanical traction also rose. Thus
the rise in the prices of agricultural commodities (partly home
by consumers) more than compensated for the elimination of
subsidies for purchasing agricultural producer goods.

The transfer of incomes, in the Algerian case of a fraction of
oil sales, to agriculture through raising agricultural prices and
wages can be justified by the high proportion of the population
that agriculture must still retain. It avoids or slows down the
transfer of workers when sufficient non-agricultural jobs have
not yet been created. It also makes possible the equipment of
farms to a higher level and, when the conditions are created, the
modification of production methods. Increased agricultural
productivity will enable the self-financing of agricultural
development, enlarging the demand for industrially made goods and
providing the dynamic force in relations between agriculture and
industry.

Stagnation of agricultural productivity may of course call
into question the validity of this pattern of financing,
intensification through enhanced use of industrial inputs without
advances in production would simply increase the waste of
resources and encourage the substitution of capital for labour.

The volume of investment in agriculture depends heavily on
agronomic and technical advances which condition advances in
production and the level of profitability of investments
realized. In Europe, for example, after the Second World War,
with the implementation of a new model of production,
mechanization, chemical fertilizers, and production
specialization, the proportion of intermediate consumption in
gross agricultural product rose from 27% in 1950 to 50% during
the 1970s. Over the same period, agricultural productivity was
rising by 4% p.a.

It should be noted that, ill-considered use of intensification
techniques can, however, have a permanent negative effect on the
conditions of production through destruction of the natural
environment and acceleration of soil erosion, due to ill-adapted
mechanization, and salting of soils when irrigation techniques
are inadequate.

Agricultural production and productivity

It is premature to conclude that there is now a permanent
tendency for agricultural production and yields to rise
consequent upon a wider use of new inputs. Statistics published
by the Ministry of Agriculture for 1985 and 1986 reveal a
significant increase in final agricultural production compared to
the average of the results obtained during the first half of the
1980s.

Agricultural production has been marked by the two very good
cereal harvests, in 1985 and 1986, which substantially raised the
average of the previous five years. Climatic conditions were
particularly favourable but the results were partly owing to the
effect of the Ministry of Agriculture's crop intensification
programmes. The year 1985 even saw record production, with three
million metric tons of cereals harvested: the ten-year average
since the beginning of the present century has been around 1.8
million metric tons.

Compared to the best three harvests of the 1970s (1971, 2,362
million metric tons; 1974. 2,680: and 1975. 2,313 million metric
tons), the 1985 and 1986 harvests registered an increase of 15%.
These production volumes were obtained on slightly fewer sown
areas (2.600.000 hectares) than the average for the 1970s
(3,000,000 hectares) which indicates a major improvement in
yields.

The pattern for other products, both vegetable and animal, was
more varied. Vegetable production rose from I.43 million metric
tons in 1980 to 2.54 million in 1986, an increase of 77%. For
animal products, poultry meat rose sharply. 12% p.a., beef and
mutton 3% and I % respectively, while milk production rose only
1% p.a. In total, increased production was markedly more for
vegetables, fruit, white meats and eggs than for cereals, milk or
other animal products.

It should be noted that private farmers have put more stress
on market-gardening (+45%), forage crops (+35%), and barley
(+36.7%) intended for animal feed and meat production. The big
state enterprises, the socialist agricultural estates, increased
the areas under pulses, wheats, and forage crops for milk
production. The state sector's policy thus attempts to correct
the effects of the market and price system that favour the
production of vegetables and meat over that of pulses, cereals or
milk.

It must, however, be again stressed that increased production
of some crops results more from an extension of areas cultivated
than from improvements in yields. Areas devoted to
market-gardening rose from 132,160 hectares in 1976 to some
260.381 in 1986 (+97%), those of forage from 239,330 (1975) to
468,840 (1984) and vegetables from 125.726 to 152.627 hectares
(+21.3%). A partial substitution of barley for wheats should be
noted, since barley, which accounted for about 26% of the cereals
total in 1976, accounted for 37% in 1984 and 40% in 1985. The
same applies to the relative growth in animal products, which is
mostly owing to imports of soyabean cake, maize and barley,
rather than development of forage crops.

Theoretically, the extension of forage crops, pulses,
vegetables and fruit was achieved by the bringing into use of
part of fallow land, which totalled on average three million
hectares during the 1970s, 40% of the land under annual crops. By
1985-86 fallow land occupied only two million hectares and was
expected to decline to 1,600.000 hectares in 1986-87.21
There is thus considerable potential for extending crops since it
is estimated that some two million hectares, with good rainfall
(more than 350mm) remain fallow. But these figures are only
indicative of a trend, more marked in the public sector, towards
improving crop rotation and developing forage crops to replace
fallow.

Deliveries of manufactured goods have enabled agriculture to
improve its equipment, extend the areas cultivated - forage crops
and pulses, market-gardening and intensify some crops (cereals),
but their impact on yields is not yet clear.

Average yields, measured since the 1980s, have remained low
both for cereals and for livestock 7.35 quintals per hectare for
cereals, 18 to 20 for forage crops. 80 quintals for vegetables
and fruit. 3.6 for pulses. The only significant rise in yields
was recorded as a result of the two very good harvests of 1985
and 1986.

It is, however, difficult to be sure that this is a permanent
result of an advance achieved following the successful mastery of
a technical change.

The increase in fertilizer consumption, for example, has not
had all the effects expected on yields in the public sector,
where they were most used. Similarly, the extension of
mechanization, notably the widespread practice of mechanized
ploughing (deliveries of equipment have doubled in the 1980s),
has not much improved yields in the private sector. Thus, the
process of agricultural intensification initiated by the
agricultural services in the public sector, on the basis of a
marked increase in consumption of capital, agricultural
equipment, fertilizers and pest control products22 was
achieved at very low levels of technical and economic efficiency.

The fact that the new technical methods were not adapted to
local conditions, and that there has been no genetic renewal of
seeds, together with the acute lack of trained manpower on farms,
considerably limit the profitability of capital committed to
increasing yields. The generalization of intensified rotation
(cereals - pulses - forage replacing cereals - fallow rotation)
makes the production units in the state sector bear the financial
risks of insufficiently tested technical and agronomic choices.
Production, for a majority of farms, does not cover growing costs
and workers' wages, and each year the state has to balance the
budget of cereal-growing.

Private farmers have limited the use of mechanization, seeking
instead to develop sheep-raising to compensate for the losses
recorded by cereal-growing. They have increased the consumption
of inputs only for those irrigated crops (vegetables) that fetch
the best prices on the market. In short, they prefer to maintain
a more extensive productive system, using less fertilizers and
then only in years with good rainfall, keeping more fallow and
reducing their growing practices to limit expenditure on
mechanization.

These observations demonstrate that the question of the
productivity of inputs precedes that of the volume of investment
to be devoted to increasing agricultural production. Opening up
access to credit for farm equipment and running costs, and
increasing public investment in agriculture can, indeed, make
possible marked advances in production. But the costs are such
that, even if they are borne by the state budget, it is
legitimate to question the economic and social utility of a
policy directed essentially at enhanced use of the material
factors of agricultural intensification.

Numerous authors have shown the relationship between the
growth of the consumption of capital and technical change in
agriculture.23 While usually technical change cannot
occur without an increase in capital, this does not automatically
lead to the adoption of new, more efficient farming methods,
especially if, for example, they are not yet available. The
volume of investment should depend on the margin of agronomic and
technical progress available that condition the level of
profitability of funds committed in the production process. In
other words, the volume of investment can he increased,
especially when it is realized partly in foreign exchange.24
and imported equipment, fertilizers and other intermediate
products, and yet lead to a decreasing yield.

In fact, the agronomic and technical conditions for a greater
use of machinery and chemicals in agriculture have not been
created concomitantly with the construction of an industrial
sector oriented towards the needs of agriculture.

In Europe, the development of modern industry after the 1950s
went hand in hand with the achievement of decisive results in the
selection and improvement of vegetable and animal varieties and
new methods of farming and animal husbandry. The increase in
purchases by agriculture occurred along with an improvement in
yields and labour productivity. The share of intermediate
consumption as a percentage of the gross agricultural product
rose from 27% in 1950 to some 50% an average in the 1970s. Over
the same period, agricultural productivity improved 2.5 times.

Numerous studies have stressed the decisive importance of
technical change in the global growth of production, and
especially of the chain of agricultural progress constituted by
the link between research, training and development.25

Agronomic research

So far, in the area of biology and technology, Algeria has
mainly sought to adapt the species and techniques of the North to
its own less favourable natural conditions. Rather than adopting
an autonomous approach agronomic research has opted for the idea
of the transfer of technology, of the advances realized by
developed agricultures. It has thus proceeded to import animal
and vegetable varieties and equipment that are the product of
selection in different ecological, economic and social contexts.

In the semi-arid regions, soil and rainfall conditions make
any adaptation very difficult, and resort to imported
technologies has proved to have little effect on improving
productivity. It has, however, had the effect of deepening
dependence on the industrialized countries, and increasingly
placing agricultural reproduction in thrall to growing and costly
imports.

In the North, for example, animal selection and research on
livestock feeding have been carried out on the basis of large
cereal surpluses, particularly in the USA.26 Transfer
of the industrialized or semi-industrialized model of animal
husbandry, aviculture and dairy cattle, has forced Algeria to
import increasing quantities of animals and secondary cereals
(maize, barley, soya-cake, for example) which it cannot produce
in sufficient quantities.

Imports of barley (2.1 million quintals) and maize (1.8
million quintals) in 1977, rose to seven million quintals in 1983
and ten million in 1985 (in addition to the 30 million quintals
of wheat intended for human consumption). The original proposal
was to develop milk production through the exploitation of
genetically improved livestock imported from France. Germany and
Holland. The growth of herds from this imported cattle has been
extremely slow. The number of milch cows increased from 10.000
head in 1966 to fewer than 100.000 in 1985, as against a local
breed herd of 700.000 head.

Genetically improved animals require a rich and balanced diet,
and environmental conditions that cannot be found locally. The
animal, therefore, has to adapt to a type of diet, made up of
poor quality hay plus imported concentrated feeds, which
underuses its genetic potential.27 Milk yields are
low, between 2,000 and 2,500 litres per annum, as against a
potential of 4.000 or 5,000 litres. Despite major investments in
the import of cattle, the building of modern cattle sheds, the
veterinary network, for example, this type of livestock rearing
accounts for only 12% of total production and 6% of
consumption. Compared to local cattle, reared by peasant methods,
milk yields have barely doubled on average. Stock breeding has
totally ignored the potentialities of local cattle, certain
breeds of which, for example the Guelmoise, had been improved
during the colonial period. Local cattle, like local sheep, have
thus not benefited from any effort at selection and improvement,
whereas a productivity gain of 10% would have been enough to make
up for the milk production realized from imported cattle.

The development model for aviculture, for the production of
chicken meat and eggs, relies on the importation of genetically
improved strains and feed purchased abroad. Dependence is total,
since strains, feed, veterinary products and certain equipment
have all to be replenished from time to time.

Other factors of agricultural reproduction have to be imported
which reduce the autonomy of local agriculture. Imports of potato
plants rose sixfold, from 13,000 metric tons in 1971 to 83,000
metric tons in 1981, equal to 80% of the country's plant
requirements. The same applies for forage seeds (86%) and kitchen
garden plants (60%). Potato productivity is very low: production
is equal to only three or four times the quantity of plants used,
0,3m mt of plants for fewer than 1 m mt of potatoes for
consumption.

In addition to the difficulties of mastering the techniques of
cropping methods, are the factors associated with plant health
and the timing of imports. Essential products still depend on the
quantity and quality of external supplies of intermediate goods,
and shortages of foreign exchange can generate supply problems
here.

The Ministry of Agriculture has embarked on so-called
development research, that is, research that seeks to apply the
biological techniques and advances achieved by industrial
countries. This approach has led to the establishment of eleven
development institutes, running programmes arranged by broad
categories of crops and dismantling the system of agricultural
research set up during the colonial period, which was better
attuned to local resources.

By 1980, in its 15 research stations, the Institut National de
la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) had only about 20 engineers and
30 technicians who, in principle, covered every area of
agricultural research.

For the six experimental research stations of the most
important development institute (concerned with cereal crops,
pulses and forage crops, which are grown on 87% of the usable
arable area), there were only 17 engineers and 50 technicians;
the institute for market-gardening had nine engineers and six
technicians; the institute for fruit tree research only five
engineers and 18 technicians. In total, the research apparatus
has only a few dozen experienced researchers for vast programmes,
and they generally work in isolation from one another. The
financial resources available for research are less than 0.5% of
GNP.28

The education and training system has suffered from a similar
approach, based on the idea that agricultural modernization can
be achieved only by exogenous methods. The engineers and
technicians who graduate from the schools of agriculture are
theoretically responsible for disseminating new technical
knowledge to replace old techniques. But the agricultural
education system has developed independently of local research
and the potential demand of peasant society.

In 1982, there were 50 teaching establishments, and the levels
and possibilities of training have been gradually increased and
diversified. Between 1973 and 1983, some 4,800 applied engineers
and 1.000 state engineers completed their training course in the
various schools of agriculture.

Despite the increase in the number of persons trained,
however, the education system's impact on technical and social
change in agriculture has been almost imperceptible. The
agricultural education system has remained external to rural
society in two ways: 1) the recruitment of students: and 2) the
fact that the schools themselves are situated in urban areas.
Thus recruitment favours not the children of peasants or those
destined to set up as farmers, but those of city-dwellers,
aspiring to be civil servants. Furthermore, virtually all the
products of education are absorbed by state departments or
para-statal agencies involved in agriculture.

There has been direct training of producers only for the lower
levels of the various teaching grades, through those adult
training centre programmes aimed at agricultural workers and
wage-earners in the public sector, and for short courses -
usually introductory or general - of between a week and a month.
Over the ten years 1974-84 they involved only 64,000 workers,
compared to the working agricultural population of 1,100,000.

As Table 4.7 shows, only an insignificant proportion of the
peasantry has received any specialized training at all. This
external orientation of the education system in relation to rural
society, which also performs functions other than those of simply
advancing that society, calls into question the relationship
between training and development.

Material advances are not the only factors in technical change
in agriculture. Equipment cannot be modernized without changing
the methods of cultivation, neither can new techniques be widely
disseminated without implementing the necessary structural
reforms. The dialectic between equipment and organization, to use
De Bernis' expression,29 is essential to an
understanding of the interactions between agriculture and
industry and the dynamic of the growth of agricultural
production. Structural reform refers not only to the distribution
of land among agricultural holdings of different sizes but also
to the social forms of the organization of labour and the manner
in which the peasantry is integrated socio-politically into the
global society.

In the Algerian strategy, the option for an autocentred
development model implied the choice of a structural policy
involving exploitation of the whole potential agricultural space
and full employment of the agricultural population. In other
words, it involved the rejection of the colonial and/or
capitalist pattern which consists in concentrating the
development of agriculture on the best land and on the water
resources available to them. In fact, a rejection of a process of
socially excluding the majority of peasants from the conditions
of agricultural modernization, leading to the destruction of
soils and the deterioration of the factors of agricultural
reproduction in vast areas of the country.

The conditions of long-term agricultural growth rested on
nurturing a natural environment that had been destroyed by
earlier modes of exploitation.

The response to agrarian dualism appeared in the 'agrarian
revolution' programme initiated in November 1971, in the first
phase of the take-off of the plans for industrialization.
Restriction on the size of privately owned land in favour of
landless peasants was the aspect that attracted most attention,
at the expense of the new pattern of exploiting agricultural
resources that it heralded.

It was proposed to increase the cultivable area by two or
three million hectares in order to bring the total usable area to
about ten million hectares through gradually putting into effect
programmes of rehabilitating the soil, mobilizing water
resources, planting trees and achieving full employment of all
the available agricultural labour force. This option had the
advantage of considerably increasing the amount of agrarian
reform land by adding areas of soil rehabilitation so as to
assign them to landless peasants and those whose farms were too
small.

Finally, it was intended that the 'groupments de mise en
valeur' (development groups), a form of work co-operative and a
means of the organization of collective labour, by landless and
small peasants, to carry out soil improvement programmes should
eventually be transformed into agricultural production
co-operatives which the state would provide with enough land and
equipment for them to function.

The implementation of the agrarian programme during the 1970s
showed the limited and largely formal character of the measures
put into effect to accompany the industrialization process. While
the nationalization of settler estates in 1963 had enabled the
state to build up a sizeable agricultural domain of two million
hectares, 27% of the usable agricultural area, the impact of the
1971 agrarian reform on private land ownership was very slight.
The national agrarian reform domain had only some one million
hectares, of which only 438.774 had been taken from private
ownership, a little less than 10% of the total amount of land
cultivated by individual farmers. The total number of collective
assignees did not exceed 7% or 8% of the total number of
agricultural workers, or 90.000 beneficiaries, organized, from
above, into production cooperatives Public ownership thus
increased from 2,084.000 hectares to 3.206.580.45% of the total
usable agricultural area (7.710.810 hectares, leaving 4.504.230
in private hands).

By the end of the 1970s, about one-third (330.000) of the
agricultural labour force was employed in the collective work
sector, the other two-thirds 1600, to 650,000) were individually
farm holdings of various sizes, most of which were too small to
support the households

There was no real impetus to encourage small peasants to
accept the new structures and collective forms of mutual
assistance and co-operation, which were at the very heart of the
strategy of agrarian modernization. The 'groupements de mise en
valeur', the centrepiece of the plan to mobilize and organize the
landless and small peasants, have a total of only 5.650 members
settled on slightly under 100.000 hectares. Under other legal
forms- peasant mutual assistance co-operatives - 16.000 other
peasants have formed producers' associations based essentially on
shared use of equipment.

In fact, the emphasis has principally been upon building-up a
public agricultural sector and expanding state control over
production and distribution. As in many African countries, the
co-operatives have served more as a means of state control over
the peasantry than as a democratic structure for organizing the
peasantry and enabling their participation in the process of
transforming agriculture.

Disaffection towards the agrarian reform and the co-operatives
soon appeared among the peasants, especially as, without
political and technical back-up, they had to face the inherent
difficulties of introducing collective labour discipline and
managing an agricultural enterprise.

In 1982-83,the formal policy of agrarian reform was abandoned
in favour of a conception of the development of agriculture based
more on market forces and activity by individual producers. In
the general framework of restructuring the economy, the agrarian
reform co-operatives were dissolved as they had been formed:
without consulting the peasants who belonged to them. The public
domain was split almost equally between the 'socialist
agricultural estates', new names for self-managed agricultural
enterprises, the area of which thus rose from 2,084,580 to
2.800,000 hectares or 36.03% of the usable agricultural area, and
the individual sector- whose relative share grew- with 63.7% of
the cultivated area. The service co-operative agencies (set up in
each commune) were also dissolved: these had previously given
assistance to the agrarian reform sector and small peasants,
especially in the area of mechanization. This last measure was
immediately followed by a sharp rise in charges for hiring
agricultural equipment on the market.

The experience of agrarian reorganization shows that the
strategy of agrarian modernization in Algeria has been largely
frustrated by the desire to keep the agrarian reform within
limits that retain the general balance of class relations within
the rural areas. State action was presented as a measure to
preserve social order in favour of the poor population in the
countryside. Even so, it did not disarm the fractions of the
middle and well-off peasantry, hostile to the agrarian reform
process, whose positions might be threatened by any extensive
democratization of social relations in the rural areas.

Slowing down the process of social differentiation, limiting
the size of holdings and redistributing land, as has been
observed in many countries, rather consolidated the position of
middle peasants in whose favour the new agricultural policy has
been implemented since 1982.

Abandoning the programme of assigning the potential
agricultural labour force to extending the exploitation of
agricultural resources based on control of the natural
environment has, however, resulted in limiting agricultural
growth and the role of agriculture in meeting the food needs of
the population. It has also accentuated earlier trends towards
soil deterioration, particularly in livestock farming and
mountainous areas, further reducing the possibilities of
agricultural reproduction in the long term.

The global dynamic of employment was thus sufficient to orient
the rural labour force to other non-agricultural activities
throughout the 1970s and the early 1980s and, through employment
and mixed incomes, to keep a large number of small peasants on
the land. But, today, it seems that with the fall in the growth
rate of the economy and the concomitant fall in external
receipts, the problem of employment is again leading to the
question of which path the development of agriculture should
take.

Notes

1. Meaning productivity per worker per annum. In China, for
example, a stagnation of the value of the working day per
employed worker but an increase in the number of days worked in
the year, and hence an increase in production per worker and per
annum can be observed. See Thomas G. Rawski, Growth and
Employment in China. World Bank. 1978.

2. As Mahmoud Ourabah stresses, the cliches peddled about the
Algerian economy's choices are long-lived, such as 'the alleged
deliberate choice to sacrifice agriculture in favour of industry,
industry allegedly sought more as an end than as a means, or
again the option for heavy industry over light industry...' Les
transformations économiques de l'Algérie, ENAP. Published
1982.

3. If the cultivated areas appear to have remained at 7.5
million hectares forseveral decades, presumably
there must have been an extension of crops in the least
favourable regions, notably in the steppe, to make up for the
good land in the plain overtaken by urbanization. The stability
of the usable agricultural area contradicts what can be observed
and thus conceals a deterioration in the quality of the land
being cultivated.

On the distribution of usable agricultural land by country see
Terres vives et population. FAO 1984.

6. 'The Algerian Tell is very disadvantaged, not only because
it has few real plains. [and] a good part of them are in the rain
shadow of the littoral chains, but also because their geological
structure does not really lend itself to the mass infiltration
and retention of the water that flows there. Most... simply runs
into the sea.' See Monjauze, 'Le sol et l'homme', Algérie
Agricole, Algiers 1966.

7. By comparison, in Morocco, surface water is estimated at 16
billion m3 and underground water at five billion m3
for a total of 21 billion m3 as against 17 in Algeria.

10. For the period 1978-79 and 1980-84, investment in
irrigation is not included in agricultural investment. With
two-thirds of water resources used by agriculture, it is logical
to increase the figure for agricultural investment by the same
proportion.

11. See the IREP/Ministère de l'Industrie study on the needs
of the agricultural sector for industrial goods. 1970.

12. Compared to the norms recommended by the technical
services, the use of fertilizers is less than 41% of prescribed
needs in the public sector and 18% in the private sector: the
quantity prescribed for the whole of agriculture totals 500.000
metric tons.

13. The economically active population includes the employed
population plus those seeking work and women working part-time.
The employed population includes the population working at the
time of the census or who worked at least six consecutive days in
the month preceding the census.

14. In Egypt, the share of material production in the employed
labour force was 66% in 1978-80. See Dowidar, 'La politique
économique de l'Infitah et la construction industrielle', L'Egypte
Contemporaine. No. 397. July 1984.

17. The rise in agricultural prices led to an explosion of
private sector demand in the areas of construction (cement,
concrete, iron, bricks etc.) goods intended for replacing
dwellings and, more rarely, speculative buildings.

18. In the private sector, soil is generally prepared for
sowing by two treatments with an offset disc harrow: seeds from
the previous harvest are hand sown. The recovery of seed is also
done with the harrow. Exclusive use of the offset disc harrow for
soil preparation frequently forms a ploughing shield that resists
rainwater infiltration end root penetration. Use of the same
implement for covering seeds also leads to a random lifting
followed by poor development and bad tilling after the lifting.

19. These prices must be seen as floor prices applicable to
the public sector which delivers its production of cereals,
pulses and milk to state marketing and processing agencies.
Market prices valid for the private sector are much higher.

20. There were two successive rises in the prices of semolina
bread and cereal derivatives: 20% in 1985 and 20% in 1986.

21. See interviews with the Minister of Agriculture in El
Moudjahid, 24 June 1986.

22. The budget head 'supply of so-called
"intensification" factors' rose from AD 1.500 million
in 1982 to AD 2.250 million in 1986.

23. See Keith Griffin. The Political Economy of Agrarian
Change, Cambridge. Mass.. Harvard University Press 1974.

24. The foreign exchange cost of production for some staples
can reach 90% for battery eggs: in Morocco, it is
approximately 60% for cereals.

25. Yamada and Hayami assert that in Japan 40% of global
agricultural growth is due to an increase in inputs and 60% to
technological change. Griliches' analysis of the growth of total
productivity in US agriculture demonstrates that farmers'
educational level accounted for 13.5%, and extension and research
27.4%. J. P. Wampach. 'La croissance de la productivité
agricole', Développement Economique et Agriculture - Cahiers
de l'ISEA, Vol. IV. No. 2, 1970.